If I could gift you a basket full of books.
After her beautiful, gently challenging webinar presentation to Faith and Money Network earlier this month, author Lydia Wylie-Kellermann shared this list of climate-focused children’s books featured in her own book, This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse.
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I am mindful of little tidbits that I would love to leave with you. A few of those are books. Books that I love as a grownup and that I love reading to my children. The gifts of stories and art have such an enormous power in shifting and shaping who we become. May we never underestimate the power of beauty.
I would so love to sit around a table together swapping our favorite earthy books and reading them aloud to one another. I imagine we could create a long, wonderful list. But for now, here are just a few that I really, really love and want to make sure you know about.
The Harmony Tree: A Story of Healing and Community
By Randy Woodley. Illustrated by Ramone Romero. (Friesens Press, 2016)
This is one of those books I buy in bulk and gift to all the new beloved babies in my life. It makes me cry each time I sift through the pages. It is the story of an old grandmother oak who is the only remaining tree left after the forest is cut down. Yet, it seeps with the power of community, the power of story, and the possibility of transformation. Under it all lies the truth of colonization and the broken relationship of settlers with Indigenous communities and the land. Yet acorns fall carrying hope that we may be moving into a new time of healing.
Everybody Needs a Rock
By Byrd Baylor. Illustrated by Peter Parnall (Aladdin, 1985)
I love rocks. Holding them and searching for them, I am mindful of the stories and memory they hold. This book that lays out how to find the perfect rock just for you. I find myself pulling it off the shelf and reading it to kids and adults… and then sending them off into the woods to wander and return with a beloved rock.
We are Water Protectors
By Carole Lindstrom. Illustrated by Michaela Goade. (Roaring Book Press, 2020)
This gorgeously illustrated book honors the Indigenous-led movements across North America that are leading the cry to protect our waters- from pipelines to pollution to privatization. In Detroit, surrounded by 20% of the world’s fresh water, we experienced again and again the attack on water. Moves by corporations to soak up bottled water or plans to privatize the whole water systems. We experienced the lead poisoning in Flint and the water shut offs in Detroit. Water is the frontline of this struggle and Indigenous communities are teaching all of us the way towards courage and resistance.
The Curious Garden
By Peter Brown
This book is beautiful in its simplicity. As a child finds an old train track and plants and tends a few seeds. The garden begins to spread around the whole town. As I look at the pictures, I feel the echoes of postindustrial Detroit. Both in the gloom of empty factories and poisoned land… but also in the ways that urban agricultural movement spread through the city building community in its wake. And like all my favorite children’s books, it points to the power of children nudging them towards those places of joy and imagination. Belief that children can change everything.
The End of Something Wonderful: A Practical Guide to a Backyard Funeral
By Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic. Illustrated by George Ermos
The Lost Words
By Robert Macfarlane. Illustrated by Jackie Morris (Anansi International, 2018)
I referenced this book in early chapters. It is big and gorgeous and full of poetry. You cannot help but run your fingers across the pages falling in love with each plant and creature. Each page offers illustrations and poetry to one of the words that has been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary because it is no longer relevant to children’s language needs. Acorn. Dandelion. Otter. Willow. It is a book to sit with, to weep with, to fall in love with, and to resist by learning these words by heart.
How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other
By Rebecca Stefoff and Naomi Klein (Atheneum Books for Young Reader, 2022)
Over the last few weeks, my ten-year-old, Isaac, has asked me to start reading this aloud to him each night. It has become one of my favorite times of the day. Naomi Klein has been such a clear and powerful voice for so long and I love hearing her speak directly to my child’s grief, mind, and power. The book speaks clearly the truth about climate change without sugarcoating anything. And yet, it is also filled with stories we so rarely hear in our media about the powerful and creative actions that young people are doing all over the world. In the very first pages, readers are given a definition of climate justice making the work of racial, economic, and eco justice inexplicably bound together. Somewhere amidst the magnitude of it all, there is palpable hope that we really could change everything.
May stories flow like rivers
summoning us into our life’s work on this sweet earth.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann | September 2025